A Terrible Indictment On American Doctors
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The opioid crisis in America is a terrible indictment on American doctors. The fact that OxyContin was widely prescribed as a safe cure for pain despite being an opioid is testament to the stupidity and gullibility of American doctors. The training and experience of medical practitioners should have indemnified them with a healthy scepticism for claims made by the pharmaceutical companies in this instance. Opioids have been known to be highly addictive for many decades and there have been no exceptions to this over the period.
American Doctors Must Doubt Drug Company Claims
Yes, the Sackler family, owners of Purdue Pharma, manipulated the FDA and falsified data around the safety of their opioid drug. The willingness of doctors, however, to believe in the sanctity of the commercially driven medical science edifice is naïve at best and expediently mercantile at worst. If doctors are so completely in the pocket of Big Pharma it is a very bad day for Americans in need of medical help. MDs need to have the objective strength to stand apart from the sales driven culture of the drug business. Doctors are really required to have doubt and a healthy scepticism in response to drug company claims. The overwhelming evidence of pharmaceutical corporations bribing doctors through lavish dinners, gifts, and holidays must make them bristle with suspicion.
Big Pharma Buying American MDs
The manipulation of the business of health by Big Pharma is considerable. Support groups around conditions and illnesses have been infiltrated by drug companies in the form of funding and sponsorship. This was clearly revealed in the inquiries into OxyContin and Purdue Pharma. National and community pain management organisations were bought by Purdue Pharma and the associated Sackler family companies via their money. Members of the FDA involved in the approval process found themselves moving on to well paid jobs at Purdue Pharma. Indeed, state attorneys in the justice system likewise were headhunted by Big Pharma.
Oversight agencies do not work in the capitalist system because these inspectors are poached and bribed by the deep pockets of corporate America.
Similarly, politicians pass legislation friendly to these corporations and later find themselves on their payroll upon leaving office as consultants. This makes the checks and balances within the system a weak joke in terms of their effectiveness in real terms. Government in America is bought and sold by big business. Money talks and Big Pharma is the loudest voice in the room. Capitalism does not serve democracy well and it does not serve health well either. If you have members of Congress spending their entire time worrying about being re-elected and it costs millions of dollars to do so, then you have a system that does not serve the people. Similarly, a health system, driven by pharmacology and the businesses making these drugs, is in the hands of profit driven masters. Doctors have become mere shadow puppets of their drug lords handing out a pill for every condition and situation. The over-prescribing of medication is endemic throughout America.
Giant pharmaceutical corporations are so economically powerful now that they dwarf governments around the globe.
Covid only made these behemoths even more massive. Pfizer, Johnson & Johnson, Novartis, Roche and Sanofi all generate revenue in excess of $40 billion per year. The sales departments of these mega corporations have tentacles throughout the medical edifices around the world. Doctors and dispensing chemists are the influencers and retailers for this simply gargantuan industry.
Doctors hold a special place within our society. The white lab coat is similarly a symbol of the presumed purity of the healer at the heart of the medical system.
In an emotive sense, people do not instinctively associate healing with the money making principle. When someone gets sick they, often, panic and just want a cure. This is exploited by a health system driven by capitalism, where the importance of making money and delivering dividends to shareholders drives the cart.
In the current opioid crisis in America there were a number of doctors who ruthlessly exploited, for financial benefit, the addictive qualities of OxyContin. This is a terrible indictment on American doctors in itself, but that many more MDs claimed to be hoodwinked by the FDA and supporting scientific material provided by Purdue Pharma is probably worse. It attests to a dumbing down and lowering of standards within the American medical fraternity. It tells us that the sales driven culture of Big Pharma is supported by American doctors. Medicine in the US is predominantly all about the dollars and less about patent welfare.
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